Unlikely Brothers

by John Prendergast

  Not long after Little Charles got shot, I heard about this dude named Cool. Word was, he was the baddest motherfucker in the neighborhood, and right away I wanted to meet him. Thirteen years old and dealing crack, but already I was bored. A buddy of mine brought me to meet him one day.

  Cool turned out to be a grownup, like twenty-two or twenty-three. He was short and stocky, with a light-colored complexion like mine. What made that motherfucker look so evil, though, was his eyes. They were kind of yellow, like cat eyes. He’d look at you straight on, man, and you’d go cold as ice. First time I walked up on him he was like, “What are you doing here? This ain’t your part of town,” and I was like, “I came down to see what’s up with you. I’m tired of that bullshit up there.”

  “Shorty,” he said, “you don’t want to hang with me.”

  “Yes I do.”

  He looked at me with those evil yellow eyes and then smiled. From under his jacket he took a big-ass gun—a Ruger nine-millimeter—and handed it to me. It was heavy, and warm from being up against his belly. “Let’s see what you can do with that.”

  My buddy took off. He didn’t want any part of that shit. But I was going to be a little man and show what I could do. Cool and I took a walk up O Street until we saw shuffling toward us, on the other side of the street, a classic raggedy-assed crackhead. You can always tell a crackhead; their mouths twitch. This one’s mouth was twitching like a motherfucker, and he had the face of a man looking to score. That meant he had a little money in his pocket. I crossed over and walked right up on him. He didn’t even notice me coming up on him because all he saw was a little kid. But he sure as shit saw that gun I put up in his face. He reared back with his eyes real big. “Give it up,” I said, and he did—two crumpled twenties. My heart felt like a basketball in my chest; I could hardly breathe. Armed robbery!

  Cool was watching me from across the street, and I could hear him laughing. As I got back to him across the street, he took the gun from me and put his arm around my shoulders. “You’re all right,” he said. “Walk with me.” We went back to his place, where he gave me a leather jacket, a sharp little hat, and my first gun. I turned it over and over in my hands; I couldn’t believe it. My own gun. It wasn’t much of one: a .32 revolver with a long barrel—not the kind of gun any real gangster would carry. It was too weak, and it was too awkward to fit easily in your pants or pocket. But it was a real gun, and it was mine.

  I said to Cool, “I want you to walk up the street with me, and show the guys who I’m hanging with now.” I wanted to be the macho man. He said all right. I put that .32 in my pocket, and we walked up there to where my friends was hanging out—Fred, Gangsta, Bo, Alvin, Mickey, and Big Boo. Big Boo was something, man; he used to panhandle in Georgetown and make like $600 in a day. When they saw me hanging with Cool, they was like, whoa. I was somebody now.

  Cool wasn’t much of a drug dealer. He sold a little bit, but that wasn’t his thing. Cool was a robber. And the people he liked to rob were drug dealers because they had money and it wasn’t like they was going to call the police. I was riding around with him one day, and he saw some guys walking with nice jackets. He hit the brakes, jumped out, and not only took those dudes’ jackets but pistol-whipped the shit out them, just for the fun of it.

  What I loved about Cool was, he was violent, and that gave him respect and power in that neighborhood. In the Sursum Corda projects, people would just give him money so he wouldn’t rob them. Just by hanging around him, people would treat me with respect, and some people even feared me. His girlfriend used to tell me to stop hanging with him, that I was too young. But I wanted the respect that hanging around him brought me.

  Cool was one go-hard motherfucker. So we’re sitting in the car outside the McDonald’s one time, and Cool has his oowop on his lap. An oowop is an Uzi. I see his eyes suddenly go all cold, and through the windshield there’s two guys pulling up in a big dark car to the drive-up. “I know those motherfucking cops,” Cool says, and before I can do anything, he gets out of the car and he’s on his feet with that oowop in his hands and just blazing away at those poor motherfuckers. Man, they drove off so fast, bouncing off the curbs and shit. They wasn’t no cops; they were just two guys trying to get something to eat! Man, there’s bullet shells everywhere, and people screaming and crying, and Cool, he gets back in the car and picks up his burger, takes a bite, and we drive off and he’s chewing like it’s nothing. I loved that shit! He was doing the real thing.

  Things back home was kind of falling apart. Don hadn’t been doing too good; the drinking was getting the best of him, and he was fighting a lot with my mom. They’d really go at it—screaming and throwing shit. She’d beat up on him with her fists—really whoop his ass—but the thing about Don was, even drunk there was still a nice man in there because he never once hit my mom. And he was still nice to me.

  One problem with being only thirteen was that the guy in the neighborhood who had good weed wouldn’t sell to me. I had no trouble buying crack, because the guy selling it to me knew I wasn’t using it myself. But the weed seller, well, he didn’t think kids as young as me should smoke. So I’d say, Don, here’s $10. Go get me some of that good weed, and he’d do it, and he’d buy himself a little wine while he was out.

  Then his mouth took to twitching, and I knew then we was going to lose him for sure because once they start smoking crack, that’s all they have room for in their lives.

  One day, my cousin Glen whipped Don’s ass. I don’t know what set Glen off; he was usually a cool dude. He knew how to draw real nice. But something Don said or did must have pissed him off, because he gave Don a thorough ass-whipping. Not long after that, Don was gone. It took me and James and Sabrina a while to catch on; he wasn’t there when we got up to go to school, and wasn’t there when we came home, and wasn’t there the next day. Gradually we figured out we wasn’t going to be seeing Don no more. It was a big deal; we all liked Don. He’d been around a long time.

  Uncle Artie was still around though. Still a skinny little motherfucker, and pretty much just hanging around the house all day, drinking. Only now he was doing crack too. And I was the one selling it to him. So it was more than just, “Gimme that eeeyyeee.…” Now it was, “Gimme that rock.” When my aunts Stella and Glynda got wind of that, they about shouted the roof down, said I was making Uncle Artie sick. So I went to Artie and told him I couldn’t get him his crack no more. And you know what he said to me? He said, “I’m going to get it from you or get it from somebody else.” Well shit, I kept selling to him. He was going to smoke it anyway, and I might as well be the one who got that money.

  And then everybody in the family figured out I was the guy to go to, and pretty soon I was selling to Aunt Evelyn, Aunt Frances, Uncle Mark—anybody who had the money. Then my cousin Glen’s baby-mama left him, and he started smoking crack too—crack he bought from me. Thirteen years old, and I was the family drug dealer. I got so out of hand with my mom, she couldn’t handle me at all.

  Then she got a new boyfriend named Kenny, and things settled down again. Kenny was a cool dude. Older than my mom; he must have been in his fifties. Thick in the body and light-skinned like me. He was bowlegged and missing three fingers off his right hand. But his brother was a master electrician, and Kenny sometimes did a little work for him. Mostly he was a street guy—a drug addict, but a real nice guy. He took care of us real good. Thing is, even with Kenny around my mother wasn’t about to control me.

  I only went to seventh grade for a week. I started out okay, but after a week I told the teacher, “I’m sick; I want to go home.” She sent me down to the principal, and he told me, “You need to go back to your class.” I don’t know why, but I went off. I guess I was all wired up from dealing on the streets. I jumped up and got right in that man’s face and shouted, “I am going to kick your motherfucking ass! I’m going to shoot you!” I was becoming a tough little motherfucker from hanging with Cool. Man, they put me out so fast.… I had to spend the rest
of the school year on the street.

  The one guy who wasn’t a drug dealer or doing drugs who cared about me was J.P., but I didn’t see him for a long time during all this because he was going back and forth to Africa. Then one day he showed up, and we went fishing with James and David like we’d always done. There I am, standing on the dock back there behind the Watergate Hotel with my little rod in my hands, just like I’m eight years old again, but I’m thinking about my crackheads, and who else is selling their shit on my block—thinking like the little drug dealer I was. Every now and then I’d glance over at J.P., and he’d either be fishing like he was ready to stare a hole in the water, or he’d be sitting scrunched up on the dock with some big book or file open on his lap. I kept waiting for him to ask me what I was up to. I didn’t know if he knew about all the shit I was into, and I didn’t know how he’d be about it. I was nervous; what if he decided a drug dealer wasn’t worth hanging with no more? The one thing I wouldn’t have been able to take was J.P. judging me, J.P. being disappointed with me, J.P. rejecting me.

  Turns out, J.P. rarely said a word about it. Maybe he didn’t know. It was weird, though, that he didn’t jump all over this since he was always so full of questions. My mom was telling him that I was dealing, carrying a gun, and not going to school. But right from the beginning, I would pretend that everything was normal, and I convinced J.P. that none of that stuff was true. I convinced him that my mom got it all wrong about what I was doing. I’ll bet he was really confused, cause he saw me smiling and acting like a kid with him, just like always. J.P. probably didn’t want to believe the stories he was hearing from my mom, so he mostly left the whole thing alone. He just kept everything on the level of the light and the fun. We didn’t get serious for more than a minute.

  I didn’t know if I was relieved or disappointed.

  My new mentor now was Cool, and that shit was confusing as hell. One time we’re pulling up to his house and this half-naked lady comes running out screaming. “I know that ain’t my mom,” Cool says, but it is, and she’s all fucked up and screaming that some dude in the house had just raped her. Cool gets out of the car and shoots that motherfucker in the head twice as he tries to run out of the house: Pa! Pa! Like it’s nothing.

  That scared me, seeing him do that so cold, but it didn’t stop me hanging with him. Because at the same time, he’d take me with him to do fun stuff, just like J.P. We’d go skating—roller skating in the summer, ice skating in the winter. Whooping around all wobble-legged like a couple of little kids. We’d go bowling, and to the arcades. You don’t think about it until you’re in the life, but drug dealers take time off to have fun just like everybody else. And I think in his own way, Cool loved me.

  Much as I loved hanging with Cool, I still had a good side in me, the side that wanted out of all that shit even if I really didn’t know it at the time. I remember one day I woke up and thought about it, and said to myself, “I got to stop this shit before somebody kills me.” I went to Cool, and he said, “What the fuck you mean you don’t want to do bad things no more?” He pulled this gun out and put it up against my head and said, “The only way you’re going to get out of this is I’m going to kill your ass. You know too much about it.” He scared me right down to my shoes. I really thought he was going to kill me.

  JOHN PRENDERGAST

  If you had asked me, when Michael was ten years old, if there was a one-in-a-million chance that he’d become a crack dealer, I’d have said, what, are you on crack? No way. Not Michael Mattocks. His attitude was so positive. You only had to look at his face to see how sweet and innocent he was. I’d have said Michael would be the last kid from D.C. who’d go down that road. All he ever talked about wanting to do was take care of his mother and his siblings. “J.P.,” he’d say every time I saw him. “I can’t wait to buy my mother a house. She’s had a hard life. She needs my help. I swear to God, J.P., as soon as I can get a job I’m going to move them out of this place and take care of them.” What I clearly wouldn’t acknowledge was in that environment, with the crummy schools they were stuck in, the fastest way to take care of his family’s needs—though risky—was to deal crack.

  I’d thought that my teaching Michael to read would give him a head start on school. I’d thought that my example—of a hard-working, scholarly guy who also had a lot of fun—would make him eager for classroom learning. It was part of the illusion that he was really my brother, a self-delusion that certainly had no room for any reality that included Michael as a gun-wielding drug dealer. Not after all that I had invested in him, and the superhero story in my subconscious of how I was rescuing him and his siblings from a life of limited opportunities. Without visual evidence, how would I have allowed myself to think anything else but what Michael was reassuring me, that he would never do such things? And while we’re at it, how could a brother of mine be anything but a stellar student? Look at Luke!

  Luke, though, wasn’t being raised every day next to the most infamous housing project in D.C., wasn’t living on North Capitol Street with Uncle Artie in that house, wasn’t going to schools that looked more like dreary unkempt prisons than educational institutions. It’s a measure of how wildly I was overestimating my own influence, and my own importance, that I thought the relatively small number of hours I spent with Michael would counterbalance the chaotic, underfed, survival-of-the-fittest milieu that was his day-to-day reality, replete with poor schools, few jobs, major crime, no investment, and a criminal justice system that focused far more on punishing criminal activities than preventing them.

  At the time I certainly understood the “school-to-prison pipeline,” but for some reason, in my mind it didn’t apply to Michael. Our country seemed comfortable with the idea of suspending from school an at-risk kid with documented family turmoil for a year at the central point of his adolescent development, even though all the evidence I had read showed that an overreliance on suspensions dramatically increased the odds that a kid would fail academically and eventually drop out, with all that entails. I didn’t overtly acknowledge it at the time, but drug dealers wouldn’t let go of Michael as quickly and easily as the school system did. The dealers clearly saw his motivation and potential, and they were more willing to invest in him than the school system, which just saw another troubled kid. But that’s not to say I shouldn’t have been there for Michael too. I guess I just had more faith in the institutions around him than I should have.

  As for my own situation, the condemned apartment building I was squatting in was crumbling around me, but I didn’t want to pay rent. I was earning too little at my job at Bread for the World, and I wanted to save every penny because I had a vague idea of starting an orphanage somewhere in Africa. But the fact was I needed to make more money. At the time I heard of a city agency that ran group homes for the developmentally disabled, and the agency offered free housing to anybody willing to look after the clients. As a second job, it would be yet another time sink, another emotional commitment, another universe of needy people intertwined with my life. But no burden seemed too heavy, so I signed up.

  I ended up moving into a big house with seven men, between forty and sixty years old, each of whom had developmental challenges that had left him at the approximate mental level of a ten-year-old. They could function well enough—dress, do dishwashing and other service jobs—but they needed supervision. Boy, did they need supervision. John and Eddie were twin brothers; Fred, Charles, Johnnie, Mac, and Brew—it was like being a counselor at a summer camp of gray-haired teenage jokesters. I called them the Dream Team, and in my usual way I made them the responsibility of everybody around me. When I had to go to Philadelphia, I brought them with me in an agency-supplied van, and my parents entertained and cooked for them. Of course, everybody had a ball. Especially my dad, who—even though I still wasn’t communicating much with him—had a whole new audience.

  The Dream Team with my aunt and me, from left to right: Freddie, Aunt Joanne, Brew, J.P., John, Ed, and Charles


  When my cousin got married in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and I had nobody to cover for me at the group home, I loaded the whole Dream Team into the agency van with me and brought them along to the wedding, where they sat in the back grunting, coughing, wisecracking, and hissing like a class of unruly boys on the first day of school. There was some disaster at the hotel, I remember—maybe one of them left a bathtub running, or some such, and two rooms were flooded. Of course, I had Michael, James, and their little brother David there too, and they ran wild. I remember there came this moment of peace in the middle of that weekend when neither the kids nor the Dream Team were around and I had a chance to breathe a little. Then I discovered why. The entire Dream Team was bellied up to the hotel bar with Uncle Bud and Aunt Jo, everybody getting roaring drunk while Michael, James, and David were getting into trouble on the other side of the hotel. I’ve blocked out my memory of the weekend after that.

  My visits to Michael and James were changing. Denise occasionally pulled me aside when I showed up, to give me a long earful about all the terrible things Michael was up to. Running with bad kids. Smoking cigarettes. Smoking weed. Playing around with guns. Dealing drugs.

  Guns? Dealing drugs? Michael? No way.

  Each time Michael’s mother would lay out the litany of sins, would I follow up with the relevant authorities? Did I grab Michael and demand some answers? Did I kick his ass around the block for even thinking about dealing drugs, or pat him down for a gun? I didn’t. I told myself each time that it was a one-off, that Michael had merely been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sure, he was a little wild in class, and he might have experimented with cigarettes or a little weed—he was a thirteen-year-old boy! And maybe he wasn’t the most studious kid. But there was no way Michael Mattocks was dealing drugs or carrying a gun. To me, that incredible light still beamed out of that round face of his. He still had that fibrous core of goodness to him that wanted to look out for his mom and his siblings. I saw what I wanted to see, and moved along.